Postcolonial Asylum

Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law

David Farrier

Description

Postcolonial Asylum is concerned with asylum as a key emerging postcolonial field. Through an engagement with asylum legislation, legal theory and ethics, David Farrier argues that the exclusionary culture of host nations casts asylum seekers as contemporary incarnations of the infrahuman object of colonial sovereignty. Postcolonial Asylum includes readings of the work of asylum seeker and postcolonial authors and filmmakers, including J.M. Coetzee, Caryl Phillips, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Leila Aboulela, Stephen Frears, Pawel Pawlikowski and Michael Winterbottom. These readings are framed by the work of postcolonial theorists (Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Paul Gilroy, Achille Mbembe), as well as other influential thinkers (Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Rancière, Emmanuel Levinas, Étienne Balibar, Zygmunt Bauman), in order to institute what Spivak calls a 'step beyond' postcolonial studies; one that carries with it the insights and limitations of the discipline as it looks to new ways for postcolonial studies to engage with the world.

Postcolonial Asylum

Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law

David Farrier

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements Note to the ReaderList of Figures Introduction: Before the LawA scandal for postcolonial studiesThe camp dispositif Overview 1. Nothing Outside the Law The colonization of the in-between Kenomatic fetish The heritage of colonial infrahumanity Necropolitics and national narcissism 2. Horizons of Perception In/visible relations Gorgoneion Horizon of perception 1: the camp in the city Horizon of perception 2: the camp and the dispersal system Horizon of perception 3: the camp and asylum destitution 3. Be/held: Ban and Iteration Be/heldBogus women Re/producing 'home' Continua 4. Allow Me My Destitution Parasitic reading and reading parasites Dead letters Kalumnia and formula 'Let me become the echo of a name to you' Preference and assumption 5. Terms of Hospitality The receding refugee Asylos/Asylao The transgressive step The necessary other 6. The Politics of Proximity Response-ability Metaxis The journey is the film is the journey The limits of dignity Afterword Bibliography Index